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I’ve had a blog for about a decade now - I wanted to host it myself rather than use some blogging infrastructure, since I was afraid that blogging infrastructur
by commandlinefan 7y ago
I’ve had a blog for about a decade now - I wanted to host it myself rather than use some blogging infrastructure, since I was afraid that blogging infrastructures would become evil in the future (see: Medium). I also wanted a comment section, but as soon as I turned it on, I got hundreds of spam messages every. single. day. I shut it down and started working on adding captcha support. My custom captcha solution did pretty much nothing to slow down the spammers, and I realized how much time and effort I was going to have to spend developing and maintaining it… I decided to hand the reins over to the fine folks at Google, instead. If they want to recoup their costs by having visitors on my site spend a few seconds training self-driving cars, that’s a trade-off that’s worth it. It’s also worth noting that the article doesn’t actually point out anything that’s particularly evil - just points out the potential for some evil in the unspecified future. Although I agree that the best time to tackle evil is now rather than later, I also don’t see any alternative for recaptcha, so I’m going to continue to use it and hope for the best.
- judge2020 7y agoPerhaps the wordpress method of comments would work for you without a captcha - you allow comments but hold for review any comment that has a potential link in it. Most spammers skip posting links in WP comment sections unless they specifically are trying to market to the site admins.
- flemhans 7y agoNo they don't, WP sites left unattended this way will amass millions of posts pending approval
- david422 7y agoI have a small website. The spammers found it quickly. I added a simple form field eg "name" that was hidden with css. If filled in, the request was rejected, but with a 200 response. Spam disappeared instantly. I did find out later that some legitimate users were getting rejected due to auto fill or something.